How To Overcome Retroactive Jealousy OCD

Saturday, September 17, 2016 By Jeff Billings

Retroactive jealousy OCD is a condition in which someone has an unhealthy obsession with his or her partner’s romantic or sexual past.

Often it can spiral out of control to the point where the sufferer is unable to stop thinking about their boy or girlfriend’s past and ends up resorting to destructive behaviors in order to try and make themselves feel better.

These often include constantly quizzing their partner about their ex-lovers, invading their personal privacy and spending hours online trying to work out how to overcome retroactive jealousy.

If you suffer from retroactive jealousy OCD you probably know just how stressful all this is, and how damaging it can be to your relationship.

Indeed, many end in failure when either party walks away from the relationship, unable to handle the stress anymore.

If you’ve been struggling to get over retroactive jealousy, however, this needn’t happen to you. In fact, retroactive jealousy is not as powerful as it may appear to you right now.

Getting Over Retroactive Jealousy OCD

In order to beat retroactive jealousy, the first thing you need to do is understand that this is your problem, not your partner’s. As with all areas in life, it’s how we emotionally react to events that are most often the problem, not the actual event itself.

This is especially true when it comes to retroactive jealousy OCD. The fact that your husband once loved another woman, or that your girlfriend once enjoyed casual sex is not the problem. Your emotional reaction to these events in the past is what’s causing you undue stress.

A negative emotional reaction like this is often due to how we perceive ourselves as much as how we perceive others.

In the case of retroactive jealousy, a sufferer often lacks a certain amount of self-confidence and/or has a low opinion of themselves. This in turn means they get anxious about the past because they’re comparing themselves to a partner’s former lovers and not quite matching up.

Have a think about just how confident you really are in yourself? Are there any qualities you feel are lacking within yourself that you worry your partner may find in someone else? If so, isolate what areas you’re feeling less than confident and then get to work rectifying them.

Take a moment now to close your eyes and think about the person in your partner’s past you’re most jealous of. Now imagine you’re a super confident individual who’s not afraid of anything and can take on the world. Does this person from the past still seem as significant?

Overall, to suffer from retroactive jealousy OCD is to be anxious about who your partner may leave you for in the present, not who they once dated or had sex with in the past. And working on your self-confidence is the best way of combatting feelings that your partner may want to secretly leave you for someone else, which in turn will stop the jealous thoughts and emotions about the past.